HR Strategic Focus Part 1: What is Your Role?

You are sitting in your office and a colleague enters the office and asks you to please explain what the role of the Human Resource professional is both inside your organization and in the business marketplace as a whole.
How would you respond to the question?

There are only two responses that you could provide to your colleague. The first is that your responsibilities are to ensure that the organization stays out of trouble. You assist the organization with benefit questions and handling personnel problems. I would suggest to you that 90 percent of your colleagues would respond in this manner. If they do so they are involved in the
transactional role within the HR world. While what you do is important to the organization at the time it is not forward thinking.

The second response is that you as a human resources professional work with the line management and upper management to explore the human aspects of their decisions. These decisions can look great on paper but if you do not take into serious consideration the impact of these decisions on the human capital assets of the organization the path down the road is going to be a nightmare. In this response, the human resource professional demonstrates that they are involved in a
transformational role within the organization.

The decision is clearly yours. You can either be part of the here and now or you can be part of the future projection of the organization. Being in a strictly transactional role places you within a silo who looks at only what the immediate demands are being placed on you. You do not operate from the macro view of the organization. Being in the transformation role places you at the format of the strategic decisions on where the organization is headed as we progress through these economic times.

HR Strategic Focus Part 2: Are You Part of the Solution or Are You Part of the Problem?